


On Your Way

by pocketmumbles (livelikejack)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, If You Squint - Freeform, M/M, can you believe this was supposed to be a roadtrip AU, this is very much NOT a roadtrip AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:56:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livelikejack/pseuds/pocketmumbles
Summary: Scott gets into the driver’s seat. He checks the rearview mirror automatically–there’s always someone hunting them, always–but jerks away before he can see.
Violet follows his gaze. “Don’t worry, Scott,” she says with a crooked grin. “You’re still the scariest of them all.”
“Yeah,” he says, and drives.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: _consider paige &violet and derek&scott on a cross-country road trip together!!! (which maybe turns into zombie apocalypse type situation but not like in an overly bleak, dark way) but anyway consider the great potential of this foursome traveling together!!_
> 
> I ended up writing this instead. I don't even know what this is.
> 
> For [Sini](http://margueritelareine.tumblr.com/).

“Really, Violet?” Scott says.  _“Again?”_

Violet doesn’t look up from cleaning her knife. Next to her lie two crumpled bodies in tattered clothes and well-worn boots. The nearest one has been slashed through the mouth, and Scott belatedly realizes that the dusty lump next to him is a tongue. “They asked the wrong questions,” Violet says.

“They’re always asking the wrong questions.”

Violet drops the bloodstained rag. She slowly rises, slips her knife into its sheath, then meets Scott’s gaze. “They asked about her.”

Scott looks back down at the bodies. Worn jeans, tattered scraps tied loosely around their necks, and shirts that only look a few weeks old. And the boots. Caked in mud and cracked from age, but solid soles. Heavy. Fresh laces through metal teeth. “You can’t kill every hunter after her, you know.”

Violet doesn’t answer. She brushes past him and climbs into the car. “We should head back before it gets dark,” she says, kicking her foot up on the dashboard. “Heard there’s monsters out here, going bump in the night.”

Scott gets into the driver’s seat. He checks the rearview mirror automatically–there’s always someone hunting them, always–but jerks away before he can see.

Violet follows his gaze. “Don’t worry, Scott,” she says with a crooked grin. “You’re still the scariest of them all.”

“Yeah,” he says, and drives.

 

They stop at a gas station for the night. It’s a small thing on the side of the road, dust-blown and abandoned like everything else. Scott doesn’t even see it until Violet points it out to him, until it melts out of the darkness just before they speed on by. 

It’s empty, like all the places that Violet finds. Paige watches the door while Violet picks her way through the aisles and tiny backroom, and Scott sits in the car and watches Paige. She smiles tiredly at Scott. A familiar routine, but unnecessary, they both know. Violet finds safe places, or the places make themselves safe for her to find. It’s what she does. Violet finally emerges from the small shop and nods them inside.

The lights are already on when Scott steps through the door. It had been dark from the outside; he could’ve seen his own reflection in the windows if he’d looked. But in the shop, the lights are on, and the walls are warm. They spread out in the least grimy aisle, passing their scavenged food back and forth while Paige tells them stories of the Once Upon Time.

“In the Once Upon Time,” Paige tells them, “places like these were made for travelers. Nothing and no one as far as the eye could see, but here you could eat, and drink, and gather what you needed before you went on your way.”

_On your way_. People always had somewhere to go, in the Once Upon Time. Somewhere to go, someone to see, something to do. And places like these to show them the way back home. Scott wonders if these tired, flickering lights could show him his way.

“These places were made for people like us,” Violet says.

Paige smiles and hands her a plump apple. “For people like us.”

 

* * *

 

Before he met Violet and Paige, he’d never slept through the night. There were monsters, after all, and those who hunted them. But now that he’s with Violet, he doesn’t have to worry about finding a safe place in the dark. And now that he’s with Paige, he doesn’t have to stay awake listening for bumps in the night.

She doesn’t sleep. It’s what she does. She watches Violet, most nights, when she thinks no one is awake. But when Scott wakes, inevitably, they stand at the window and watch the moon.

“In the Once Upon Time,” Paige told them, “you could see stars in the sky, bright little pricks of light hanging with the moon. They would fall, sometimes, and you could wish upon them.”

Scott wouldn’t know what to wish for, even if he did see a star fall from the sky. An ache sits in his chest, some days–most days–and it eats and eats and eats at him until he can’t bear it anymore, takes his car and drives far away. He drives, and aches, for _something_. Something just beyond his fingertips, just off the tip of his tongue. He wants it, desperately, and yet he doesn’t know what it is. It’s a good thing he can’t wish for it, anyway.

Most nights, they watch the moon in silence. But tonight, with the stars dark and the moon bright and Scott’s chest aching, as always, Paige says, “You’re so much like your mother.”

It would be a lie from anyone else. No one has mothers, haven’t for a long, long time. But Paige is from the Once Upon Time, is the only one living who can remember it, and she never tells Scott lies.

(She lies to Violet, sometimes. In small, unspoken ways, the same ways that Violet lies to her. But they don’t bother lying to Scott, and Scott doesn’t bother lying to them. With looks like his, he has nothing left to hide.)

“My mother,” Scott says. It sounds foreign on his tongue, heavy and doubtful with an odd sort of ache. “I was a child.”

“Was,” Paige agrees. “When things changed, when the world…” She trails off with a quiet sigh. “We had to change, too.”

It’s pitch black outside. Scott could see his reflection in the window if he wanted to look. “How did you know her?”

“She was a nurse,” Paige says. Images from her stories spring into Scott’s mind: a neat white cap, a bright red cross, needles in hands tinted blue or green. Better, the nurses always did. They made you better. “I was sick. She was always so kind.” She pauses, then adds, “You have her smile.”

His mouth parts. Fangs slide over his lips, sharp and gleaming to tear horror from throats. “Really.”

“Really,” Paige says. “In the Once Upon Time, we had fangs and claws and all kinds of monsters.” She turns to Scott, and her skin glows even paler under the moonlight. “We just couldn’t see them the way we can now.”

Scott closes his mouth. They stand in silence, until he asks, “Did she have a mother?”

Paige doesn’t look at Violet, sleeping peacefully in a bundle of blankets. “She’s from a different time,” she says, shifting slightly. A lock of hair spills over her arm, silky smooth and just barely out of place. “After, everyone was born an orphan.”

Scott was a child, once. But there is no such thing as children in the After.

 

“You’re running again.”

They’re driving along the road, far, far away from the gas station. Paige lies in the backseat, eyes closed. She isn’t asleep, never is, but Violet tucks a protective arm over her anyway. “It’s written all over your face,” she says.

Scott checks the rearview mirror automatically, but only emptiness stretches behind them. He means to look away, but Violet’s stare locks him in place. Red flashes in the mirror, bright as blood, and he bites down the burn in his eyes. “I’m not running.” Violet raises her eyebrows, so he clarifies, “I’m not running _away.”_

Violet stares at him for a long moment. Then she sighs and turns her gaze to the window.

He drives wherever his hands lead. It’s what he does. Today, they steer towards cracked tar and overgrown concrete with an urgency wound tight in his chest. Paige sits up as they speed past a fallen skyscraper. “I don’t know this place,” she says.

It should make him pause. Violet grips her knife, eyes flicking to meet Scott’s in the rearview mirror. Unknown means hunters, monsters, too much risk. But the knot in his chest urges him on, _faster, closer, here, here._ He lifts his eyes to the mirror. “I’m still the scariest of them all.”

He sees Paige smile. Violet twirls her knife between her fingers. “Yeah,” she says, and Scott drives.

 

Scott steps around a lumpy splatter of blood. “Paige.”

She cleans her hands and daintily drops the rag before looking at him. “They looked wrong,” Paige says.

He glances at the bodies. Worn jeans, threadbare rags tied loosely around their necks, and garishly bright shirts. Dark tears spill from the nearest one’s eyes–or what’s left of them, anyway. “They’re always going to look for her.”

“I know,” Paige says. For a moment, her eyes seem to darken. Then, “There’s medicine in the next room. I’ll get what I know.”

The moment passes. “Violet’s getting supplies on the second floor,” Scott says. He hesitates, then tries, “I…there’s…”

“I know.” Paige slips on thin gloves that snap against her wrist. She offers him a small smile. “Go.”

 

* * *

 

His hands led him here. Here, to a hospital in the heart of a crumbled city. _Here_ , the knot in his chest whispers as his feet stumble up the cold stairwell. _Here, here._

_I’m here_.

The hallway is dark, with some odd contraption of metal and cracked cushions turned on its side. He feels his way along the wall, moves past door after door swinging open to empty rooms. The air hangs thick and still–undisturbed for too long, like all hospitals in the After. Even monsters know these places house nothing but death.

A door rattles under his hand. Not barricaded–locked. People used to lock things in the Once Upon Time, carried keys to hide their secrets safe and sound. The knot in his chest pulls him towards it, pounds deafening in his ears. _Here, here, here._  Scott peers at the odd cracks in the doorknob, twists, and it breaks easily in his hand.

The door swings open.

Light, he notices first, spilling awkwardly between the curtains on the window. Scott touches them carefully, and they fall with a clatter that echoes too-loud through the empty hall. Dust kicks up from the floor and into his lungs, and he has to crouch against the wall until his coughing subsides.

There’s so much dust, he realizes as sunlight pours into the room. His footprints track through it on the floor, and even more rests on the window and plastic tables. And…on the far side of the room…

The bed is surrounded by blocky, winding, plastic things. Lifesaving machines, probably, once, but now silent witnesses to the body laid out before them. Scott inches closer. It’s wearing some flimsy, impractical thing for a shirt, and the sheet tucked under its arms is thinner than a bandage. There’s some sort of plastic pinched around its finger, and Scott lifts it away, leans closer to follow the wire back to a lifeless machine–

Its chest moves.

Scott leaps back. He waits, breath caught in his throat, and the body’s chest rises. And falls. And rises again. Barely perceptible under the thick blanket of dust, but this body…this _person_ …

_He’s alive_.

Scott should run. What isn’t dead is going to kill you, and Scott should run. But his hands pull the sheet from the bed and clean the man’s face. Clouds of dust fall over them, makes Scott pause as he coughs and coughs and coughs some more, and…laughs.

His hands brought him _here_ , to a hospital of all places, to hunched over a living man and gasping for air. Every time Scott tries to breathe, he inhales dust caught in the man’s beard, and he laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. He should be running. This is the closest he’s ever been to someone without them trying to kill him. His lungs burn. He should be running. He–

–coughs.

No, he hadn’t coughed at all. Scott watches, helpless, as the man coughs again, and shifts, and opens his eyes. He gazes at Scott, sleepy and soft and unlike anyone’s ever looked at him before, and he says, “You have a beautiful smile.”

Scott’s breath catches. He blinks once, twice at the man smiling up at him without a hint of fear in his eyes. Smiling at _him_. He exhales. “I’m Scott.”

“I’m Derek.”

The knot in his chest loosens, unwinds through his body like warm blood. Derek’s hands reach for him, cradle so gently around his face and _oh,_ Scott understands now.

They’re on their way.


End file.
